Canada: The Redman Strain

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To Canada's-wheat farmers, rust is as fearsome a word as death or taxes—and once it was just as inevitable. When the fungus attacks wheat, the crop is destroyed. But after the black year 1935, when 85,000,000 bushels were lost to rust, Canada's Dominion Experimental Farms Service developed two "rustproof" wheat strains, Renown and Regent. Last week, the Service announced that rust, adapting itself to new conditions as Nature usually does, is now attacking the rustproof strains. But Canada's wheat crop was in little danger. Reason: the Service has developed a new wheat strain which resists both the old and the new type of rust.

This year some 30,000 bushels of the new Redman seed will be ready for planting next spring. So too, probably, will seed for another new strain, Rescue wheat, on which the destructive wheatstem sawfly (annual damage: $20,000,000) blunts its proboscis in vain. This year, as the E.F.S. celebrates its 60th birthday, it could boast that it had made Canadian wheat the world's toughest.

Wheat is only one E.F.S. triumph in its record of shaping Canadian agriculture. It has proved again & again that virtually any agricultural plant or animal can be developed to suit Canada's conditions. Its staff of 500 experts costs the country only $3,250,000 a year, but they have made and saved billions of dollars for Canadian farmers.